


the shadows know me

by cold_nights_summer_days



Series: Anchor [4]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comfortember, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker Has Issues, Peter Parker Has Nightmares, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, day three, incomplete grief, mentions of skip wescott - Freeform, ngl, this made me a little soft, very very brief and nothing detaailed by any stretch of the imagination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:05:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27370138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cold_nights_summer_days/pseuds/cold_nights_summer_days
Summary: day three: Nightmares----Tony told him to try and get a few more hours of sleep before morning. Peter shook his head, but his eyes were already slipping closed.I don't want another nightmare.Soon enough, his body’s need for sleep overcame Peter’s will to stay awake, and he slept.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: Anchor [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1996039
Comments: 3
Kudos: 179
Collections: Comfortember 2020





	the shadows know me

**Author's Note:**

> hi! I hope that this little note finds you in good spirits! this is just your daily reminder that you're doing amazing and I, for one, am glad that you're here <3 
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> title is once again from darkside by alan walker because r e a s o n s

Nightmares about anything and everything had been plaguing Peter in the weeks since he’d come to stay in Tony’s penthouse (because even though the papers had been signed and he legally lived there, it wasn’t quite home yet. Those things took time, after all.)

To be fair, nightmares had been plaguing Peter for almost as long as he’d been alive. They’d just gotten worse since he moved in. Peter found that odd. He’d hoped it would have been the other way around, honestly, because he hated that he couldn’t even sleep through the night anymore. He was fifteen, not five.

On one such night after a particularly long day, Peter wanted nothing more than to slip into a dreamless sleep and finally rest. He wasn’t so lucky, and now it was three in the morning, and he was still staring at the ceiling (from the floor of course, because the mattress was too soft but he didn’t have the heart to tell Tony because he’d already done enough for him by now).

With nothing better to do, Peter decided to test out just how much his hearing had improved. The penthouse was too far up to hear much of the street noise, but he could pick out some of the louder car horns that rang out intermittently. He could also hear Tony’s footsteps down the hall—which was weird, because again, it was three in the morning. They stopped outside his door, and then came a small knock. It wouldn’t have been loud enough to wake Peter up if he’d been asleep.

But he wasn’t asleep. He was painfully, frustratingly, awake.

“Yeah?” Peter answered, shifting his attention from the ceiling to the door. Tony opened it slowly, revealing a sliver of light from the hallway.

“You’re still up?” He asked. Then, once he realized Peter wasn’t in bed, added, “Wait, where are you?”

“I’m on the floor.” Peter raised his hand so that Tony could see where he was. Tony opened his mouth like he was going to comment but ultimately decided this was not the battle he wanted to fight tonight.

“We can talk about that later. Are you okay?” Tony asked instead. Peter shook his head. He was too tired to lie, and too tired to hold it in.

“I just want to sleep, and I can’t, because I just wake up every two hours and what’s the point in going to sleep if you won’t even last the night anyway? I really don’t even understand why, because it seems like it got worse since I started living here and it doesn’t make any sense!”

“Well,” Tony said, stepping into the room and making his way to sit next to Peter’s makeshift blanket nest. Peter twisted to face him in the dark. “It actually kind of does make sense.”

“How?”

“It’s called incomplete grief. They actually teach about it in foster classes since a lot of kids have some pretty traumatic backgrounds. Believe it or not, it’s actually a sign that you’re healing because your brain knows that you’re in a safe enough position now to finally work through your trauma.”

It made sense to Peter, sure. But it sucked. Peter sighed and twisted back to his original position of watching the ceiling. He was too tired to even cry about it anymore. After a moment of silence, Tony spoke again.

“Do you want to talk about them? The nightmares, I mean? It can help to talk about them sometimes,” He said, concern laced deep in his voice. Peter thought briefly of Ben and May, who would ask him the same thing before bringing him a mug of hot chocolate (with exactly six marshmallows—just the way he liked it). The memory only served to make him feel worse.

“I – I just see _him_. And I – I can’t –-“ Peter stuttered, trying and failing to force out the dark thoughts that clouded his mind. “I can still feel him and – and I –”

Tony cut him off gently. Peter had never explicitly explained what happened, but from context clues and reading up on his files, he’d been able to piece it together. He had it on his far in the future to do list to actually ask Peter if he wanted to press charges, but that was not an issue he was going to bring up right now.

“You don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to, Peter. Or if you’d like to talk about it, and just not with me, I can set up an appointment with a therapist. I’m here, of course, but talking to a therapist might be better. They can help in ways that, even though I want to, I can’t.”

“But that’s expensive,” Peter mumbled back, glancing at Tony for a moment. Tony smiled softly back down at him.

“It’s worth it if that’s what you need, though. I want you to be able to heal, and if an expensive therapist is what’s going to help you do that, then that’s what we’ll do.”

“Thank you,” Peter said eventually. The words were slightly slurred from how tired he was. Tony told him to try and get a few more hours of sleep before morning. Peter shook his head, but his eyes were already slipping closed. Soon enough, his body’s need for sleep overcame Peter’s will to stay awake, and he slept.

Only an hour later he woke again with the image of Ben bleeding out on the concrete seared into his eyelids. He felt thirteen all over again, helpless and scared while one of his last family members bled out in front of him. Even with his eyes open, the scene played out in front of him again. The gunshot, the fall, the blood. Too much blood on the concrete and his hands and not enough still in Ben’s veins to keep him alive.

“It’s okay, Peter, you’re not there anymore, remember?” Tony said, his voice cutting through the memory. Peter blinked, trying to make sense of what was happening.

“What?” He asked, slightly disoriented in the still dark bedroom. There was no alley and no Ben and certainly no blood. Instead, Tony was still sitting next to him, but this time his face was illuminated by the phone he’d tossed aside when Peter had started panicking.

“Nightmare,” Tony said by way of explanation. Peter wanted to scream. He knew it. He knew it was just going to happen again. And this one hadn’t even stopped when Peter woke up, it just carried right on over to his waking world.

Peter whispered a quit thank you to Tony for snapping him out of it. It must not have been comfortable sitting on the floor in the middle of the night, but he didn’t even complain. (He’d just wanted to make sure Peter had truly fallen asleep, but that didn’t seem to be the case).

“Of course,” Tony answered. He said it like it was an absolute, that he was always going to be there to pull Peter out of his nightmares.

“Will you,” Peter paused, hating that he sounded like a child. “Will you, um, will you still be here when I wake up?” He asked.

“Would it make you feel better?”

Peter nodded meekly, slightly embarrassed that he felt like he needed someone to sit with him through the night. As they often did in times of need, Ben’s words drifted back to him. _It’s okay to need help sometimes._

This was one of those times, and that was okay, because Tony answered with, “Then yes, Peter. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little thing!
> 
> If you want to read more, check out/subscribe to the series!
> 
> [Here's my tumblr! ](https://funky--lil--spider.tumblr.com/)  
>    
> Also, I've opened my comissions if you'd be interested in that!
> 
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